Wallenstein would not ask for a command. To offer him a subordinate one was to invite a cold refusal. Father Lamormain and Maximilian were resolutely opposed to any offer being made, and the Emperor knew it. Yet he felt by no means sure that Tilly and Pappenheim could stem the Swedish tide, and he was the head and front and citadel of the Empire, fully aware of his responsibilities towards the state and towards the church, especially the latter.
At Maximilian's words the Archduchess Stephanie made an involuntary movement forward, but checked herself and stood where she was. Nigel, from the place where he stood amid a knot of courtiers, could see her face.
It bore that strange rapt expression of the eyes that he had seen in the vision of Bramante's conjuring, and the eyes were fixed on Wallenstein. Indeed, Wallenstein looked up for an instant and saw them. Nigel could have sworn that a flush swept below the swarthy and much-lined skin of the great commander; but the face with its high cheek-bones and small bright eyes had recovered its bronze composure in the instant.
[CHAPTER XV.]
THE ARCHDUCHESS AND WALLENSTEIN.
The persons who witnessed the unexpected arrival of Wallenstein asked themselves why he had come; Nigel because to his reflective mind the ostensible reason, anxiety to impart the news of Gustavus to the Emperor, was insufficient; the Archduchess Stephanie because she desired with all the intensity of woman that another cause might be at work.
Nigel in the camp with Tilly had heard accounts, more or less garbled, of the famous meeting of the Electors with the Emperor at Ratisbon a year before. Reichstag, the Diet, or Day of the State, was the name of such meetings, and that had been a momentous one for Wallenstein, for the world. All the Electors were there save only the Elector Palatine, the Winter-King, who was a wanderer over the face of Europe. And without the conclave were Friar Joseph, "His grey Eminence," the familiar of Cardinal Richelieu, and Cardinal Caraffa, the Pope's nuncio. France and Italy alike on this occasion were pulling at the Electoral puppet-strings, and making them hold up hands for the dismissal of Wallenstein, the "insolent Wallenstein." And when a captain-general, for four years in the field, has set all the Electors of Germany, Catholic and Protestant, against him, it may be deduced that he has shown himself careless of giving offence, and has forgotten the respect due to princes. The Emperor had wished to retain him. He knew that he had been well served, and in so far as his extreme religious views would allow him, he was a just and certainly courageous prince. But he had been forced to defer to the Electors who had chosen him to be Emperor.
Nigel agreed that a man as great as Wallenstein would never have ridden from Eger to Vienna to bring this news to the Emperor, notwithstanding that, if Wallenstein had ever shown anything approaching to personal affection and deference to man, it had been to the Emperor. He would have sent a swift messenger, or allowed the Emperor to learn the news in his own way, as he would have learned it in a day or two at the most. And Nigel was right in his conjecture.